All Activity

And most phone land lines are now VOIP which is also digital.

You can quit using your cellphone. It’s based on wireless two-way radio and digital voice technologies.

I follow this type of programming scheme also. Local (Phoenix) Northern Az, Southern Az Western Az, Eastern Az. Both portable and mobile are set up the same exact way. Only difference is I have a few less zones on mobile as I can put more channels in there for a bank. I did 2 friends like this and the like it also. This way when traveling they just go to that zone to listen to traffic. (Scan list is by zone also but user programmable)

OUCH!!!! I bet the doctor kicked himself over that. We have an issue with our Motorola Quantar 2m repeater. The inrush when it first transmits will trip the 12v dc to 120v ac inverter. The only way to get around that was to put a line conditioner in between the repeater and the inverter. One of our older club members was trying to catch the inrush to see how many amps it was with an old, but good, analog amp meter. He learned right away that an analog meter was not quick enough to catch the inrush. My new Klein CL800 just barely caught it. We never did find the exact fix for the inverter throwing a ground fault and shutting down when the Quantar firsts transmits. The Tripp Lite power conditioner is the only way to keep that from happening. The weird thing is that our older Motorola 70cm repeater and our Bridgecom GMRS repeater are both plugged into the inverter and there are no issues.

I have another story about my original 87. I was doing an install on a 65 ft yacht belonging to a thoracic surgeon. Doc was on the boat while I was doing the work and saw my meter and picked it up and looked at it. He asked me where on the quality hierarchy the Fluke digital meters were. I told him they were top of the line, state of the art. Politely putting it down he cussed. I asked him why and he told me about his college roommate calling him up and asking him if he wanted to invest in his family business that was about to expand and go digital. He said "No thanks John. Those Simpson 260 analogs we used in physics class years ago will continue to be the industry standard for decades and decades to come." ... his roomy was John Fluke Jr.

At one point there was a free upgrade to the bigger white display for the original 87. All you had to do was send them a postcard with the serial number of your 87. I carried and used mine everyday for over 25 years until just about everything was worn out. Bought a new series V about 6 years ago. I bought the original when I was trying to resolve a harmonic problem that was overheating and blowing fuses on a rooftop HVAC unit. After the fuse there was a coil of excess length feed wire that had suspicious melted insulation in a reoccurring pattern. I removed that and it didn't help, so I made a slight change to the wire before the fuse and all was resolved. I bought the Fluke because someone told me the Beckman 110+ I was using wasn't enough to measure what was going on.

Maryland's cell phone law says "cell phone". Someone got a ticket using his ham radio, took it to court and won. Precedent set, in MD, using a 2 way radio while driving is OK.

This is true. When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

Tune your antenna and they'll just work

All of the Ghost antennas i've tested (more than just one brand) all performed better than the UT-72G antennas I tested them against .. that should give a baseline that they aren't as bad as "some people" repeatedly claim.

I really like the Ghost. It performed much better than I expected it to. It does seem like a good choice for heavy equipment.

Once again, if he weren't being an ass and interfering with official operations, he would have never come to the attention of the FCC and they would have never known what kind of radio he was using. Don't be an idiot.

Not quite, fixed stations are primarily used to pass DATA between two fixed locations i.e. flood monitoring stations and monitoring posts. "Base" stations are control sites which activate repeaters or fixed stations to report. Base stations are at either permanent or temporary locations and are used to pass both data and voice to other base stations or mobile stations either through repeaters or directly. This implies there are three classes of stations, fixed stations reporting to another, single, fixed station, control stations, which may serve as both control and base stations and mobile stations which have no permanent location.

After using the 42" and 18" Abbree "tactical tape measures" for a month, I have to say I'm impressed. The 42" gets as good or better SWRs across MURS, GMRS, 2m, and 70cm than the Comet 2x4 and doesn't need a ground plane. I tested it by hanging it from a rafter, so no ground plane was available. I can't say whether it actually outperforms the Comet in real-world use, because in the areas where I use my radios most, almost any antenna can get through. I can say, though, that with the Abbree and the Comet, I can use a repeater 22 miles away on one watt, which I can't do with any other antenna, but the Abbree is far more convenient to lug around. The 18" Abbree performs as well as the Nagoya and HYS 771s. Again, I can't say for sure that one is better than the other, because I don't have a particularly challenging environment, but it's certainly not worse than the others. Plus, a black AR-152 just looks badass with that antenna on it. I liked the multi-band TTM so much that I bought the GMRS version. I also tested it with a Nano VNA hanging from a rafter with no ground plane, and its SWRs were good enough, approaching 2.0:1 below 462.50000 and getting better from there. It's going into the bag with my portable repeater. I figure if I can get that thing 15'-20' up, I should get pretty good coverage. All in all, I'm quite satisfied with them. As I mentioned in the original post, they seemed a bit gimmicky, maybe more "cool" than practical, but I'm happy to report I was wrong.

Martin aka WSCD723 made this post a year ago. I would guess that by now he has confirmed that his radios work.

My bad. Someone musta bumped this old thread and I didn’t notice the date.

Hi Dave, Gil, @wruu653, pointed out that the repeaters appear in a search if you turn on Stale and Offline repeaters. But then I found something weird, a mismatch (I think?) between map view and tabular view. If I do a tabular data repeater search to include stale and offline, both repeaters appear on the map. But if I go to map first and turn on those two switches for stale and offline, the repeaters don’t appear on the map. I have written to Rich, the site administrator, to learn what I might be doing wrong. Anyway, if you do a repeater search to include Stale and Offline repeaters, both Eureka repeaters appear in the list, allowing you to select them. If you do that they appear on the map and more importantly the owner’s call sign is available for you to contact him. You might want to contact the owner and ask him to update his data on the site.

You're not kidding. Many years ago I was dealing with government surplus and you'd be amazed at what was let out in the wild that I should have never seen. Not only harddrives, but other tech that retained sensitive information. Believe it or not, the Pentagon was the worst offender. This was after 9/11. Of course, I was required to destroy the items. All of this is attributed to human stupidity and laziness. As for digital radio, I absolutely dislike any form of it.

I regret to say I haven’t mounted it yet, but will start with a ghost antennae.

A couple of mine were from a radio shop, and came preloaded with a bunch of school district stuff back east, both analog and digital. Another with a bunch of fire stuff preprogrammed. A couple have come completely blank, but that was expected given they were advertised as (and the packaging/appearance was considered with) NOS.

I looked at Pennsylvania's bill, and see that the exemption for Amateur radio was removed, so it applies, as written, to all mobile radios. However, this part may actually be interpreted such that a mobile radio is allowable, provided you aren't switching channels and are simply talking using a hand held mic, pushing only one button. So it may be okay. I will take it as such. This wasn't in the earlier iteration of the bill. It has passed and has been signed by the governor. " Defines the use of an interactive mobile device as using at least one hand to hold, or supporting with another part of the body, an interactive mobile device, dialing or answering an interactive mobile device by pressing more than a single button, or reaching for an interactive mobile device that requires a driver to maneuver so that the driver is no longer in a seated driving position, restrained by a seat belt."

Wow, we doing THIS AGAIN?!?!?!! Fixed stations are communicating with other fixed stations. Linking aside. If you have a repeater at a remote location, and a base station at your house, when you are talking on the REPEATER, that's fixed station operation. If you go to a simplex channel and talk to a mobile or portable radio, then you are operating fixed BASE. So ONE radio can operate in BOTH manners depending on how you are communicating. The other situation is simplex between two base stations. Both are 'fixed' or not mobile / portable. Reason for this is to NOT create unneeded interference on the frequency by operating at a power level above the minimum required to maintain reliable communications. Repeaters and other base stations have added range due to their elevated antenna systems over a mobile or portable and of course have antenna's with more gain as well. This isn't anything new... commercial has had this same regulation for years. The difference is in part 90 commercial they refer to the radio as a CONTROL STATION. It's still a 'base radio'. This is also how you get the maximum antenna height regulations for fixed base operations.

The message you’re responding to is over a year old. GP62 hasn’t been seen in about half a year.

Oh hell no, just an old people

IF, you are using gmrs for what is is ment for you would know if you are getting out since you would be using your radio with friends and family while going an activity. Gmrs really isn’t for chatting with randos. Might wanna try ham for that.